Style

I was a little hard on my parents in my socks post, I know. Truly, I give them lots of credit for having a litter of children and not drowning us in a well (together or separately).

So while I thought about making my first post all intellectual and shit, I quickly realized that would require me going back in time and getting the middle school me, the one who read War and Peace and Watergate transcripts for fun. Because after only 10 years online I’m all, “This is your brain. This is your brain on the internet.”

Instead, I decided to go with my strengths: bitching and pointing fingers.

But NOW I want to talk about this cool psychologist who’s been around forever, because he is the King of Flow and I have kind of been a little bit blocked in that regard for oh, the last 20 years. [If you’re the list-making, categorizing, spreadsheet kind of person I hope that explicit number makes you happy!]

I am really into ole Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, mostly because he gives me this big get out of jail free card for my laziness by saying if one hates what one is doing or is plagued by external stressors, it’s hard to focus and get anything else done. I’m sure he’d be rather “WTF??!” about my inability to restart and move forward even the tiniest bit faster, but maybe not. Maybe he’d be thrilled about that because he could put me in one of his long-term studies as a counterbalance to all the successes he tracks?

Anyway, I’m fascinated with MC and his industry of flow books. And I’m really curious about his desire to reclaim the words “dilettante” and “amateur” from the Sneer-n-Snark pile. He doesn’t say amateurs are way better than professionals 100% of the time, of course; as he points out, the Soviets made a huge mistake when they veered away from following experimental evidence and instead stuck to Lysenko’s pro-Leninist theory that grains planted in a cold climate would breed super-corn.

Unfortunately , the ways of politics and the ways of corn are not always the same, and Lysenko’s efforts culminated in decades of hunger.”

Food for thought, so to speak. Maybe it’s time for me to dust off the theories about what will make me happier and more productive and test them out. Maybe it’s time to grow super-Vix.